1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to Knowledge Management and more particularly to identifying, tracking and resolving problems reportable to a customer service organization such as a Help Desk.
2. Background Description
Corporations maintain customer service organizations to address customer problems with products to insure customer product satisfaction. Typically, customers are given a number to call or an e-mail address to contact should they have questions or encounter problems with products. The customers' contact is generally known as the Help Desk. A typical Help Desk may receive thousands of product queries daily, often reporting product problems.
However, a customer must contact the help desk before a problem may be reported and one or more Customer Service Representative(s) (CSRs) is/are assigned the responsibility of finding a solution to the particular problem. Frequently, several different customers encounter identical problems. Normally, problem history and corresponding solutions are made available to CSRs, while customers remain unaware of whether a problem is a commonplace. So, customer/users can waste precious time and resources trying to resolve problems; even problems with which the CSRs are well acquainted and may even have solutions readily available. Consequently, system productivity is reduced by users searching for solutions to such well-known system problems.
Moreover, once a customer/user does decide to seek help from the help desk, the help desk generates what is known as a “trouble ticket” for the problem. In generating a trouble ticket, the user may provide a vague problem description, that makes it difficult to extract problem details and to decide which problems are more easily solved by a domain expert. Consequently, manually creating trouble tickets may be a frustrating experience where help desk personnel collect spotty information, and under pressure to reduce length of each help desk call. Unfortunately, this frequently prolongs help desk turn-around time by requiring multiple exchanges between customers/users and support staff to fully exchange problem data to flesh out the problem and, eventually to generate a trouble ticket. Further for newer, less encountered problems, unless every CSR is aware of prior solutions, the customer/user is likely to encounter a CSR that has to learn or rediscover the same previously used solution. While help desk software simplifies handling trouble tickets, it does little to facilitate the generating new trouble tickets and resolving the related problems.
Thus, there is a need for reducing time spent solving known system and application problems and, thereby, increasing user productivity by reducing the time to problem diagnosis.